New mobile phones: new friends and servants

March 2, 2013 15:48

Dependency on technology is increasing, above all in young people who cannot even go to bed without making a phone call or checking their messages.

Roberto F. Campos

This obsession concerns psychologists and psychiatrists, who recommend distancing oneself as much as possible from electronic equipment, albeit necessary in modern life, but if its influence becomes too great, it can have a negative affect on personal development.

However, some sources, instead of recommending distance, promote a greater union due to the possiblity of a mobile telephone acting as a butler or even a soul-mate.

This advice anticipates a near future predicted by scientists, when these devices will be able to think for themselves and become so familiar with their owners that they will be able to predict their input.

The device will know what the owner needs, saving them from having to respond to tweets or even searching for friends on social networks.

This imaginative development is the work of the head of the Noah’s Ark laboratories in Huawei, Qiang Yang, a Chinese expect who is part of the country’s telecommunications giant, which is currently advancing and casting shadows on even its most renowned competitors.

The expert claims that because all people carry a mobile telephone in their pocket, we can teach these intelligent devices much more than we currently are.

Qiang Yang recently spoke at an international conference in Rome about Technology and Data.

He revealed that one of the products that his laboratory is developing is the Weibo Agent, which examines user profiles on Weibo, a social network similar to Twitter in China, and searches for tweets and people of interest.

The specialist also considers that these phones will eventually be able to respond to messages for their users, when the first tests of this type are successful.

However, Yang considers the fundamental requirement to be that the device makes correct conclusions and satisfies the wishes of the user.

These objectives will involve extremely complicated algorithms that are capable of combining data from a GPS and associating them with smartphones and tweets or publications on Facebook through internal applications.

Yang gave the following example, if a user has a coffee everyday in the same café, the equipment must be able to record it and advise the user to visit the café at the appropriate time; it could even detect this habit reflected in other nearby phones and recommend the most opportune moment to visit.

The Chinese expert teaches in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and sees the potential of these devices as an enormous terrain yet to be explored.

This study is based on a mechanism called data mining, or extraction of useful information from the vast amount of data generated in the network, which will allow the apparatus to create a detailed image of the world and its connections.

These features will make life easier for humans, whose brains cannot compete with the processing speed of these devices, which will lead them to become personal stewards or butlers.

However such a connection would further accentuate the dependence on electronic equipment and could have a negative influence on the necessity of one of these devices for a human to exist. Whether this will be the case, only time will tell.